The Lunar Codex
The codex is a permanent cultural archive of human creativity stored upon the surface of the Moon.
It contains literature, art, music, film and other creative work by more than 50,000 creative artists, amounting to more than 250,000 cultural artefacts from 264 countries and territories, spread across a series of lunar missions.
And among them is little old me.
Chronicle Worlds: Legacy Fleet became part of the Lunar Codex's Peregrine Collection.
The Codex was created by Canadian physicist Samuel Peralta, who is also behind a very successful series of sci-fi compilations: The Future Chronicles
This is what it says on their website: ‘The works are physically archived using technologies including etched nickel and silver, Nanofiche, quartz and other long-term storage media, packaged into protected capsules.’
On 8 January 2024, Churchill's Rock by K.J. Heritage left Earth aboard Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander, launched on the first flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, but shortly after launch, Peregrine suffered a propulsion-system problem, meaning that it had no hope of landing.
Ten days later, on 18 January, it was deliberately guided back into Earth's atmosphere over a remote part of the South Pacific, where the spacecraft and its payload were destroyed during re-entry.
How many people had achieved the considerably more niche literary distinction of having written something that had travelled almost to the Moon, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere?
Not many author biographies contain the phrase ‘destroyed during atmospheric re-entry’. But even that, I’m sorry to admit, didn’t particularly impress.
Back-up
Following the loss of Peregrine, parts of its collection travelled on later Lunar Codex missions, including Serenity and Minerva, both carrying material from the Peregrine archive.
And this time, they made it.
Phew!
Further reading:
My writing is on the Moon but I forgot to mention it... (I did!)
The Lunar Codex
The Story So far